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The call came while Serena Dillard’s premature newborn son slept against her chest in the neonatal intensive care unit. Hayden had arrived seven weeks early after an emergency surgery that nearly killed them both, and Serena had barely slept since doctors pulled him from her body. Monitors blinked around her in the dim blue hospital light, measuring every fragile breath he took. Then her phone lit up with the name of the man who had ignored the final three months of her pregnancy: RAYMOND PALMER.
The billionaire kicked my dog outside his luxury hotel because he thought we were homeless, harmless, and too insignificant to matter. He had no idea the aging Belgian Malinois beside me had once dragged wounded men through gunfire, or that I had spent eight years trying to forget the operation that nearly killed us both. Ranger had gray around his muzzle, scars beneath his coat, and a faded military collar most people never noticed. But when Ethan Caldwell's polished shoe struck his ribs that freezing night in Richmond, every memory I had buried came rushing back.